Adam Schwartz

Adam Schwartz

Senior Staff Attorney

Adam Schwartz is a Senior Staff Attorney with the EFF's civil liberties team.

Previously, he served as a Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Illinois, where he worked for 19 years. His cases at the ACLU challenged the criminalization of civilian audio recording of on-duty police, abusive border detentions of Muslim and Arab citizens caused by the federal Terrorism Screening Database, AT&T’s collaboration with the NSA’s dragnet surveillance program, and public access to information about Illinois’ Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center. He also advocated for policy reform regarding drones and location tracking, and wrote reports about surveillance cameras and fusion centers. His other ACLU cases addressed youth prisons, police detentions of pedestrians and motorists, free speech, religious liberty, and drug testing of public housing residents.

Adam clerked for Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has a J.D. from Howard University and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Deeplinks Posts by Adam

On June 28, California enacted the Consumer Privacy Act (A.B. 375), a well-intentioned but flawed new law that seeks to protect the data privacy of technology users and others by imposing new rules on companies that gather, use, and share personal data. There's a lot to like about the...

For many years, EFF has urged technology companies and legislators to doabetterjobatprotectingtheprivacy of technology users and other members of the public. We hoped the companies, particularly mature players, would realize the importance of implementing meaningful...

Government searches of cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices without a warrant when we cross the U.S. border may violate the First and Fourth Amendments, according to a powerful ruling by a federal court last week in a civil rights lawsuit brought by EFF and the ACLU. It...

A new Illinois bill would strip residents of critical protection of their biometric privacy, including their right to decide whether or not a business may harvest and monetize data about their faces and fingerprints. Given the growingpublicoutrage over how Facebook and Cambridge Analytica handled...

EFF has been working on multiple fronts to end a widespread violation of digital liberty—warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at the border. Government policies allow border agents to search and confiscate our cell phones, tablets, and laptops at airports and border crossings for no reason, without explanation or any...

In 2017, the federal government surged its high tech snooping on immigrants and foreign visitors, including expanded use of social media surveillance, biometric screening, and data mining. In response, EFF ramped up its advocacy for the digital rights of immigrants.
Social Media Surveillance EFF resisted government programs to collect...

Biometric screening, surveillance drones, social media snooping, license plate readers—all this and more would be required by new federal legislation to expand high-tech spying on U.S. citizens and immigrants alike at and near the U.S. border.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced “the SECURE Act” (S. 2192) on December 5...

This blog post was first published in The Hill on September 28, 2017.
The federal government sees the U.S. border as a Constitution-free zone. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims that border officers—from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—can freely ransack travelers’ smartphones...